NABOKV-L post 0027423, Sun, 25 Jun 2017 16:52:41 +0300

At Ponderosa Lodge Clare Quilty (a character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) puts himself down in the motel-book Dr. Gratiano Forbeson:

I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. (2.23)

“Dr. Gratiano Forbeson” seems to blend Dottore Gratiano (a character in the Italian commedia dell’arte) with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853-1937), an English actor and theatre manager who was considered the finest Hamlet of the Victorian era. In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita “N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.” (one of Quilty’s aliases) becomes “Robert Robert, Molbert, Alberta:”

I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”)… (ibid.)

Molbert is Russian for “easel.” Eric Forbes-Robertson (1865-1935), Sir Johnston’s younger brother, was a landscape painter. Robert Robert is a shadow of not only “the fiend,” but also of Humbert Humbert. In VN’s novel Kamera obskura (1932) Robert Horn (a gifted cartoonist but unprincipled person) is ten’ Krechmara (Kretschmar’s shadow):

The characters of Kamera obskura (translated into English as Laughter in the Dark) include Dorianna Karenina, a movie actress whose pseudonym blends Dorian Gray (the main character in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray) with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin. Aubrey Beardsley is the author of illustrations for Wilde’s play Salomé. In the Russian Lolita Gumbert Gumbert (Humbert Humbert in Russian spelling) calls Quilty (“the fiend” whose name GG does not yet know) tolstomordik (Fatface):

“Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.”

“Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.” (2.18)

Tolstomordik seems to blend Tolstoy with Chekhov, the writer who in a letter of February 14, 1900, to Olga Knipper (a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater whom Chekhov married in 1901) says that he will go to Sevastopol (Chekhov lived in Yalta) incognito and put himself down in the hotel-book Count Chernomordik:

I had made up my mind not to write to you, but since you have sent the photographs I have taken off the ban, and here you see I am writing. I will even come to Sevastopol, only I repeat, don’t tell that to anyone, especially not to Vishnevsky. I shall be there incognito, I shall put myself down in the hotel-book Count Blackphiz (Chernomordik).

Before leaving Russia on a Greek ship Nadezhda (Hope), VN and his family for more than a year had been living in Yalta. The last Russian city that VN ever saw was Sevastopol.

As I pointed out in my previous post (“Adam N. Epilinter, hypnotist & Kreutzer Sonata in Lolita; Botkin & Zembla in Pale Fire; Flavita in Ada”), the protector’s “flavid toga” (in the poem that Humbert Humbert wants Quilty to read before his death) brings to mind Flavita, in VN’s novel Ada (1969) the Russian Scrabble that Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) gave to Marina’s children (Van, Ada and Lucette). Van and Ada call Lucette “our Esmeralda and mermaid” (2.8). Esmeralda is a Gypsy girl in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831). Humbert Humbert was born in 1910 (the year of Tolstoy’s death) in Paris. On Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Paris is also known as Lute (1.28 et passim). Lute (short of Lutèce, the city’s ancient name) is pronounced like lyut (short form of lyutyi, “fierce, furious”). In his article «В чём же наконец существо русской поэзии и в чём её особенность» (“What is Finally the Essence of Russian Poetry and What is its Peculiarity,” 1846) included in The Selected Passages from the Correspondence with Friends (1847) Gogol quotes Yazykov’s poem D. V. Davydovy (“To D. V. Davydov,” 1835) that made Pushkin shed tears and that has a line: Lyut pozhar Moskvy revyot (the furious Moscow fire roars):

In VN’s novel Pnin (1957) the date of the Great Moscow Fire is mentioned:

During one melting moment, he had the sensation of holding at last the key he had sought; but, coming from very far, a rustling wind, its soft volume increasing as it ruffled the rhododendrons—now blossomless, blind--confused whatever rational pattern Timofey Pnin's surroundings had once had. He was alive and that was sufficient. The back of the bench against which he still sprawled felt as real as his clothes, or his wallet, or the date of the Great Moscow Fire--1812. (Chapter One, 2)

The surname Pnin comes from pen’ (stump). In his “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita” (1965) VN mentions obuglennye pni (charred stumps):

Alas, that ‘wondrous Russian tongue' that, it seemed to me, was waiting for me somewhere, was flowering like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate, whose key I had held in safekeeping for so many years, proved to be nonexistent, and there is nothing behind the gate but charred stumps and a hopeless autumnal distance, and the key in my hand is more like a skeleton key. (transl. Earl D. Sampson)

Pnin also appears in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962):

Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov. (Kinbote’s note to Line 172)

The three main characters in PF are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote and his killer Gradus. Their “real” name seems to be Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda. There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin will be “full” again.